An Overview

History

Telephone services in India begun in a small scale with the commissioning of a 50-line manual telephone exchange
in 1882 in Kolkata. This was less than five years after the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell.
India had approx. 82,000 telephone connections at the time of independence (1947) and by 1984 the number of connections had slowly risen to 3.05 million.
India's telecom network was notoriously unreliable and only available to a small section of households along with the corporate sector. The telecom sector was a government monopoly until 1994 when liberalisation gradually took place.
Cellular service was launched in November 1995 in Kolkata.

Expanding Network

The Indian telecom industry has grown rapidly during the last few years but has witnessed a substantial fall in growth more recently. India has the
third largest (based on the total number of fixed/mobile subscriber lines) telecom network in the world
and the second largest mobile network with 1.18 billion subscribers at the end of Jan 2018.

Mobile

The mobile subscriber base has decreased in recent months as is the case in the number of landline subscribers.
Overall telecom subscriber penetration has increased to 90 % by the beginning of 2018. Major brands sold include Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung, Vivo, Oppo, Lenovo and Micromax. Around 80 million smartphones were manufactured in India in 2016. An estimated 150 m 4G (LTE) handsets make India the third largest 4G market in the world.

Telecom Manufacturing

Xiaomi and Samsung are among the telecom companies that have set up assembly/manufacturing facilities for the production of mobile phones and other telecom equipment to cater to India's growing telecom market and exports too.